Managing Partner Greg Feary of the Indianapolis-based Scopelitis Garvin Light Hanson & Feary law practice said a bill favorable to independent contractor status for leased owner-operators in trucking is being advocated in Ohio by the Messenger Courier Association of America.
Feary was speaking April 26 on the owner-operator independent contractor model in trucking as part of his firm’s webinar series.
The Ohio efforts, Feary said, are pushing legislation that includes a “very favorable test” for determining independent contractor status.
The legislation would be similar, he added, to law recently enacted by Maine relative to workers compensation and the independent contractor-employer relationship. Known familiarly as NCOIL since the National Conference of Insurance Legislators adopted it as model legislation for determining valid independent contractors in the trucking and courier industries, it specifies a six-factor statutory test.
The American Trucking Associations has “in effect endorsed this as a reasonably good factor test,” Feary said. NCOIL model legislation is based on the test codified in 2009 in Minnesota, today viewed as a state favorable toward the independent contractor classification in trucking.
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